In January, when the temperature drops and snow starts to fall, I begin teaching one of my favorite units: Animals in Winter. I designed my own non-fiction unit that covers hibernation, adaptation, migration, camouflage, and more! You can read all about it here. Many teachers also begin this unit in January so I wanted to share some fiction and nonfiction winter animal books that are perfect for this study. I love to start a unit with a non-fiction book first so students gain some background knowledge, including important vocabulary. After reading these once through, I often go back to reference certain pages as we learn about each adaptation. Pairing a fiction book with a non-fiction book is great because you can teach students that we can find true facts in fiction books. We point out elements that are true and those that are fantasy. It really encourages questioning when reading, which is such an important skill. When we ... read more
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10 Picture Books for Goal-setting with Students
This time of the school year is perfect to work on goal-setting. The students are returning back from break and it’s a great time to wipe the slate clean and make a fresh start. Students will of course need some guidance with setting their goals. Using picture books is always a great way to help students understand a concept. Here are some great picture books for goal-setting (and working hard to reach them)! *You can click on any title to purchase the books via Amazon. These are affiliate links, which means I earn a small percentage if you purchase through these links, at no extra cost to you. I always only recommend resources I love! Squirrel's New Year Resolution BY Pat Miller This is a great one to start with. It explains what resolutions are and what kinds of resolutions/ goals to make. All the animals in the story have resolutions, but Squirrel is struggling to think of one. Throughout the story, he helps ... read more
Favorite Picture Books for a Gingerbread Man Unit
Gingerbread men are a staple during the holiday season! So many people are a fan of the little elusive cookie that everyone wishes to devour. Maybe that's why there are SO many different versions of the classic story. But you don't have to go digging through all of them to find the best picture books for your gingerbread man unit. Leave that to me! If you're looking for a list of read-alouds perfect for your gingerbread man unit, then look no further. These books will have your students engaged and begging you to read them again and again. Here's a list of my favorite picture books for a gingerbread man unit. *You can click on any title to purchase the books via Amazon. These are affiliate links, which means I earn a small percentage if you purchase through these links, at no extra cost to you. I always only recommend resources I love! Of course, you can also check your library for these titles instead of ... read more
Using Thematic Word Walls for Writing in Kindergarten and First Grade
If you teach kindergarten or first grade, you know what it's like to be asked how to spell a word over and over. . . and over again. You likely have some sort of word wall or sound wall on display in your classroom. We often use these "walls" to help students learn sounds or spelling, but they can also be a great tool for helping with vocabulary and writing. And they can eliminate the need for students to ask you how to spell a word they'll be writing often. A thematic word wall is a list of words that share a common theme or topic. You can make them for subject areas, seasonal topics, or common themes students write about. Benefits for Beginning Writers These come in so handy for emergent writers, helping them become more independent during your writing block. Thematic word walls help beginning writers in many ways: Brainstorming- This helped cut down the time a student spent thinking of a writing idea and ... read more
Sentence- Writing Activities For Kindergarten and First Grade
When we teach reading, we don't expect our students to pick up a book and read, without explicitly teaching them everything from print concepts to decoding and comprehension strategies. So why don't we do this with writing instruction? In many classrooms, students are expected to just write sentences- or even stories- with very minimal instruction on what a sentence even is! The idea is that grammar, sentence structure, and revision will be taught in the context of their stories. Yes, I know that teaching grammar and revision in context is important. But, I also know that kids need A LOT of practice with writing sentences, or else their stories don't make sense. Or, they need so much revision that it's overwhelming! Before kids can write stories, they need to learn how to write a sentence. Before writing sentences, they need to know what a sentence even is. So, we did a lot of sentence-writing activities ... read more
How to Teach Students to Sound out a Word
Stretching the sounds and blending them, aka sounding it out, is a go-to strategy for helping students decode. It’s the oldest reading strategy in the book, but perhaps still the most important. If you’re familiar with my reading strategy resources, you’ll know I use fun characters and interactive PowerPoints to teach decoding strategies and follow up with meaningful activities for practice. I’ll show you step-by-step how to teach students to sound out a word. Even if you don’t use my Stretchy Snake resource, I’ll give you ideas to help teach this essential decoding skill. Steps for HOW TO TEACH STUDENTS TO SOUND OUT A WORD Step 1: Engage and Relate! Kids love animals, so engage them with a twisty paper snake! You can make a very simple one by cutting a paper in a swirl-like motion, like the picture below. I have the little snake heads in my resource for you to use, or you can draw your own. Stretch out the ... read more
13 Picture Books for Teaching Phonological Awareness and Phonics
Using read-alouds to practice phonological awareness activities is a great way to motivate your little learners while exposing them to lots of important skills. Here are some great picture books for teaching phonological awareness and phonics. I also added ideas for activities to do with most books! *You can click on any title to purchase the books via Amazon. These are affiliate links, which means I earn a small percentage if you purchase through these links, at no extra cost to you. I always only recommend resources I love! Of course, you can also check your library for these titles instead of buying and sometimes you can find read-alouds on Youtube! Did you Take the B From my -OOK? by Beck and Mark Stanton Adorable! The author loves the letter B but when he sneezes, the Bs disappear from all the words! SO the book is left with -utterfly and other words missing the letter B, until the end where the kids call for the ... read more
6 Important Things about Phonemic Awareness
Phonological (and phonemic) awareness is an essential part of reading. If kids don't have strong P.A. skills, their reading will likely suffer. Here are 6 important things to know about phonemic awareness! 1. Phonemic awareness is not the same as phonics. While phonics includes the letter representations for sounds, phonological awareness is an auditory awareness of sounds and the ability to hear and manipulate them. Phonemic awareness is an awareness at the individual-sound level. In simple terms, if you're using letters, whether in print or using letter names, it's phonics. If you're doing auditory activities that don't include letter names, it's phonemic awareness. PHONICS activity examples: Looking at letters and making their soundsIdentifying a letter that makes a soundBuilding new words by switching letters PHONEMIC AWARENESS activity examples: Isolating the first sound in a wordBlending sounds to ... read more
How to Make an Easy Yearlong Writing Portfolio
The beginning of the year is so crazy busy and exciting, that we often don't have time to plan ahead, let alone think about memory books! Then, when we start to make memory books at the end of the year, it can get a little difficult. . . Students are asked to remember things that happened throughout the year and it can be like pulling teeth to get them to write about their memories. I mean, I have a hard time remembering what I went to Target for! There's no way I would remember what happened months ago in detail. So, what happens? Students just write a sentence or two to get the pages done and it's not their best writing at all. You know what I'm talking about. We've all seen this kind of writing: It was field day. I had fun. It is so frustrating when you know a student can write so much better! Everything you taught them about writing, thrown out the window. Ugh! Anyway, I have a better solution. Make a yearlong ... read more
Scaffold Writing with Wordless Books to Help Beginning Writers
Too many times, I've had students who have a really hard time coming up with a story idea, or writing a cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end. Using wordless books for writing is a great scaffold for students who have these struggles! My teaching assistant and I started meeting in small groups to make little booklets that already had pictures in them and kids wrote the text. This really helped so many kids, who were struggling with writing or spending way too much time on their pictures. We started with pattern books to make it simple for kids to write repetitive sentences. These are books that have the same words at the beginning of each page: "I see----", "I like----", "It is ---". Having a few words they could write helped build their confidence and they took more risks with spelling the missing words. (There is a blank version for them to write the entire sentence in addition to the pictured one below). After ... read more